A Game for the Living (23 page)

“I was just going to call Sauzas.” Theodore picked up the telephone again.

Ramón stood waiting with a calm, determined expression. He lighted a Carmencita and watched Theodore as he spoke.

“No.
.
.
.
No,” Theodore said in answer to Sauzas's questions about Carlos Hidalgo. “I have just spoken to his wife.”

Sauzas grunted an “Umph.
.
.
.
Well, there is an unconfirmed and unconfirmable report that Infante was seen this evening in Acapulco.”

“Acapulco! Seen by whom?”

“One of the boys of the town, who told the police in hopes of a reward. They said the boy who told them looked reasonably honest, but they are not sure that he is correct. A bad place for Infante to be—for us. He must still have some money and for money a thief will hide a thief, and there are plenty of those in Acapulco.”

“Do you think he could be there?”

“I think it is quite possible. Acapulco is a flashy place and Infante likes that. Maybe he got some money for his muffler, eh?” Sauzas said with a chuckle. “Well, we have flown a batch of photographs to Acapulco. He will certainly not leave the town on any boat or from the airport. Señor Schiebelhut, does your friend Hidalgo often go on binges and not come home for days?”

“I don't think so—but I don't know, Señor Capitán. I'm to call his wife again before midnight, and I can call you, if you like.”

“I am going home. But leave the message.
Adiós,
señor.”

Theodore hung up, and told Ramón that Infante had been reported seen in Acapulco that evening.

Ramón nodded. “But they are not sure?”

“No. And I don't think Sauzas is going there.”

Ramón asked who had seen the boy, and Theodore told him the little he knew. Restlessly, Ramón walked into the hall, and came back. “I think I shall go there, Teo—if there is a chance.”

“But it's only a rumor!”

“I have a hunch. What can I do here in his enormous city? If he's in Acapulco, I can find him in a matter of hours.”

“Quicker than the police?”

“If they find him first, I'll at least be there. You understand, don't you, Teo?” he said, looking at him.

Theodore understood. Ramón saw himself intervening between Infante and the police, somehow convincing the police the fellow was innocent of Lelia's murder—whereas it was not even certain yet that Infante was going to be accused of it—and protesting again his own guilt.

Ramón walked to a black window and stood looking out. “There're no planes until tomorrow morning.” He turned round. “I have about a hundred pesos, Teo, and the fare is a hundred and seventeen one way, I remember.”

“There's plenty of money in the house, Ramón.”

“I'll pay you back, Teo, I promise.” Then he walked out of the room as if to escape the embarrassing subject of money.

Theodore closed his fountain-pen and then his diary. Perhaps before tomorrow morning they would hear that Infante had been apprehended in Mexico, D.F., or in Acapulco and that he was being brought to Mexico, D.F., and Ramón would not go. But as he closed his door, he heard Ramón on the telephone in the living-room, making a reservation on the 8 a.m. plane.

When Theodore called Isabel again at twelve-fifteen, Carlos had not come home.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The gentle buzz of his alarm clock awakened Theodore at six. The house was ominously silent. For a minute he lay motionless, listening for a sound from Ramón's room. Then he threw off the bedclothes and in pajamas and bare feet went to Ramón's door and gently turned the knob, saw the undisturbed bed and the glow of a lamp.

Ramón was sitting at the writing-table with a pen in his hand.

“Excuse me, Ramón.”

“No matter.” He continued to write.

His shirt was the same blue one of last night. Theodore wondered if he had slept at all. “Have you called the police this morning?” Theodore asked.

“No.”

“I'll call them. They may have found Infante.”

But they had not found Infante. Theodore stood at the telephone in his room, in his dressing-gown and slippers now, smoking a Delicado and listening to the dull words of the police officer.

“Nothing from Acapulco?”

“Nothing, señor.”

Theodore went down to make coffee. Inocenza did not get up until seven, and he saw no reason to awaken her. He put coffee on, gave Leo his breakfast of an American gravel-like cat cereal with milk on it, and squeezed some orange juice for Ramón and himself. Without waiting for the coffee, he carried the orange juice to Ramón's room.

“I'll call the police again before seven,” Theodore said. “If you go, I'll go with you.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to. I promise you I'll not be in your way.”

Ramón lifted his brows as if it did not matter at all, and sealed his letter. From his old bent note-case he produced some stamps. “We must leave here at seven, then.”

Inocenza was dressed and downstairs at six-thirty, making them a hasty breakfast of scrambled eggs, asking questions.

“I can't say when we'll be back,” Theodore said, “but I'll telephone, Inocenza.” He was then phoning for a reservation on the Acapulco plane.

“This evening, señor?”

But he could not promise that. No, he was not taking anything with him, not even a toothbrush. He did not want to be burdened. His call to police headquarters just before seven produced no more news, and he was thinking of calling Isabel Hidalgo, when Ramón appeared in the doorway of his bedroom and said:

“Well, Teo, if you are going—”

Ramón gave Inocenza an affectionate farewell, and thanked her for caring for his bird. Theodore noticed tears in Inocenza's eyes. She understood why Ramón was leaving, because Theodore had told her that Infante had been seen in Acapulco. She looked at Theodore as Ramón spoke, as if she would have liked to beg Theodore not to let him go.

“If I had thought of it earlier this morning, I would have taken my bird to Chapultepec Park and released him,” Ramón said to Inocenza.

“What? He would die, señor! He wouldn't know how to find his food!”

“With the whole woods to eat from?” Ramón replied.

“Pepe would not even like the park!” Inocenza said.

“Release him today, anyway,” Ramón said quietly but like a command. “Release him in the patio.”

“But—the cat, señor—”

“He may be killed, but I don't want him caged any more.
Adiós,
Inocenza.” He went out of the door.

Theodore also turned to go, but Inocenza snatched up from the sofa the newspapers she had bought that morning and thrust them into his hands. He started to tell her not to obey Ramón's order about the bird, then with a wave of his hand he went out. Ramón's determination to go to Acapulco was part of his destiny, whatever happened, and the senseless sacrifice of the bird, if it improved Ramón's mental state, perhaps would play its part.

Ramón had already found a taxi. During the ride to the airport they said nothing and looked at the newspapers. Infante's being seen in Acapulco provided the headline of the story, and the incidents concerning the muffler were all there—that Ramón Otero and himself and Eduardo Parral had been approached by Infante either in person or by telephone and asked if they had lost a muffler. But there was no speculation as to the significance of this. Ramón glanced through the papers and refolded them. He stopped the taxi near a mail-box, and got out to post his letter. Theodore had noticed that it was addressed to Arturo Baldin, and it crossed his mind that Ramón might have written something like a farewell letter to Arturo, that Ramón foresaw a fight to the death with the police. It also occurred to Theodore that if he stayed with Ramón he might also become a target for the pistols of the police, though he did not know now what he could possibly do about it.

Acapulco presented its brilliant, smiling crescent at mid-morning, a tumbled ring of golden green hills, a fringe of hotels that seemed to sit right in the blue ocean. White flecks of sails looked perfectly still on the surface of the bay. They got out of the plane into a warm, thick atmosphere that after a few minutes made them remove their jackets and ties. A limousine took them into the town and deposited them near the main plaza on the Costera, the great main avenue that curved around the bay.

Ramón wanted to go at once to the police station to learn whether the boy had been found, but Theodore suggested a telephone call, on the grounds of saving time. He knew that Ramón would get into some kind of altercation with the police if they went there, and that they both might be detained for some time. Ramón called from a telephone on the counter of a plaza bar, his face tense, his eyes glancing over the people at the tables and the passers-by on the sidewalk.

“Does it matter who I am? I am a citizen asking a question!” Ramón said, and Theodore gestured for him to keep calm, but Ramón was not looking at him. “
Está bien! Gracias!
” He hung up, and slid a twenty-centavo piece across the counter to pay for the call. “They have not found him,” he said to Theodore, swung his jacket over his shoulder, and they walked out on to the sidewalk.

The plaza was noisy with tourists and Acapulcans, sitting at sidewalk tables over early
apéritifs
. They had walked half around the plaza when Ramón said: “Teo, I am going to do a lot of walking, and I don't expect you will enjoy it. Would you like to sit and have a drink somewhere?”

“I know what he looks like better than you,” Theodore said, “and I'm just as eager to find him.”

They got back to the corner at which they had entered the plaza. Before them, the row of coconut palms down the centre of the Costera swayed and hissed in the gentle breeze from the ocean. A slow-moving car with an amplifier blared a cha-cha-cha tune, and over this a man's recorded voice screamed unintelligibly about a local movie.

“So many hotels,” Ramón said irritably.

“He would not go to a hotel! I'm quite sure the hotels are alerted. We should go to the lowest sections of the town—wherever they are,” Theodore added, because he was not familiar with the lower sections of Acapulco. “How about the Malecón? The boys on the wharf. They always know everything that's going on, you know.”

“Let's try behind the Cathedral first,” said Ramón, and they turned and headed for the blue-and-white Cathedral of Arabian style whose two domes could be seen at the end of the plaza, above the trees. The Cathedral's three tall doors, one in front and one on either side, stood wide open to the tropical breezes and the stares of tourists.

Ramón hesitated at a side door and said: “I'll just be a minute, Teo,” and went in.

Theodore lit a cigarette and looked up the sidewalk, which presented an uninteresting vista.

Ramón came out after two or three minutes, and they continued the slightly uphill climb and walked for half an hour among the streets of small private houses that resembled those of small towns in the U.S.A., with their bench swings and front porches. Once Ramón detached himself and crossed a street to speak to two boys sitting on a porch rail. Theodore saw them shake their heads, and when Ramón turned away, one of them put a hand over his mouth foolishly to hide a grin. They went up La Quebrada, a street that led to the steep rocks from which local boys dived every night for prize money. Ramón walked to the small plaza overlooking the rocks and looked at the few figures on the stone benches. None looked like Infante.

“Down to the Malecón!” Theodore proposed, and Ramón came with him.

It was a considerable walk, and they took a different route back to the Costera. Theodore looked over the drifting, chattering groups of boys and young men they passed on the way, but he wondered if Infante—if he were still here at all after the warning in the papers —were not holed up in the house of someone he had bought off to hide him. On the other hand, Infante was not the sort to be cautious for ever. He would want to go to another big town, and there was none near Acapulco.

The Malecón was a cement embankment where little boats and sail-boats tied up and from which people took off for an afternoon's fishing, returning at sundown to have their pictures taken beside hanging sailfish. Here there were always boys and men fishing with hand-lines, boys awaiting their girl friends, and loiterers of all kinds who came to buy marijuana and dope from certain skippers of the sail-boats and motor-launches. Ramón asked Theodore not to walk with him now, so that he could better talk to some of the boys, and Theodore sat down on an empty bench, where he was immediately approached by a barefoot child of six or less who offered to shine his shoes for a peso.

“
Dos pesos,
” Theodore said.

A blank stare, and then a grin. “Okay! Two pesos!” in English, and he fell to work.

Twenty yards away, Ramón was talking to a slim boy in a white shirt and white slacks. The boy shook his head repeatedly, and drifted on, without a glance back at Ramón.

“Take it easy,
niño
!” Theodore said. “If you get polish on my socks, you are
worth
only one peso!”

But he gave him two pesos and a fifty-centavo tip, and continued to sit on the bench, watching Ramón's dark-clad figure growing smaller, far down the Malecón. He was bound to be recognized as Ramón Otero by someone, Theodore thought, and the word would be passed around. They'd have no peace. Theodore foresaw false leads, and gratuities paid for nothing. He stared out at the beautiful, neutral Pacific, whose surface rose and fell even within the quiet bay like a powerful and tranquil breathing. His clothes were beginning to stick with perspiration. He wondered if tonight he and Ramón could not go to that quiet stretch of beach beyond Hornos and plunge into the sea naked. Or would it remind Ramón too much of the nights when Lelia had been with them here, swimming with them, too, in the darkness? Ramón would not tell him if he were disturbed by his memories, he would simply refuse to go to the spot. Theodore closed his eyes to the glaring sun and remembered a night with Lelia and Ramón on the little beach, the nervous, cool lap of the small waves and the sound of a ripe mango or coconut falling from a tree to the sand.

In the afternoon they explored Caleta Beach as well as Hornos, the afternoon beach, Ramón oblivious of the stares of the nearly naked sun-bathers as he tramped in his city clothes among them. Theodore stayed on the paved walk, from which he could see the beach as well as the people on the street. When Ramón emptied the sand from his shoes for the last time, it was 5 p.m. Theodore persuaded him to go into Hungry Herman's for a hamburger, but Ramón would not order anything but coffee. From here, Theodore made a call to Sauzas, whom he did not get, but he learned that Infante had not been found and that there were no new reports from Acapulco. Theodore told this to Ramón, and proposed that they find a hotel for the night, rest a while, and go out again in the evening, when everyone would be out of doors or at some night club. Ramón agreed to the hotel, but said he did not need to rest. His eyes, however, were already haggard, and Theodore felt sure he had not slept the past night.

“I have the feeling he is in this town, Teo,” Ramón said. “Or somewhere near. There's Pie de la Cuesta, you know, and Puerto Marques. A big hotel there, too.”

“Ramón, he wouldn't dare stick his head into an hotel!”

“What makes you so sure?”

“All right, ask at the Hotel Club de Pesca, and see what they tell you!” Theodore said somewhat impatiently. The Club de Pesca was a gaudy, hulking hotel, built in a curve, just the hotel Infante would choose, if he dared.

They walked towards the Club de Pesca, and Theodore inquired for rooms in four or five hotels that they passed, all of which were filled. At the Club de Pesca, Ramón approached the desk and asked if a Señor Salvador Infante was registered there.

“Or Señor Salvador Bejar,” Ramón added, and Theodore walked farther away, embarrassed.

“Infante?” came the clerk's voice. “The one they are looking for? I wish he
would
come in here, señor!”

Angry, Ramón rejoined Theodore, and they left the air-conditioned lobby and went out into the sun. “One has to ask to know!” Ramón said as resentfully as if he had been personally insulted. In Ramón's mind, the young delinquent was a persecuted child, at worst a minor offender who had paid enough for his misdemeanors by being harassed over the whole United States of Mexico.

“Let's try the other end of the Costera for an hotel,” Theodore said, “otherwise we'll be walking back all the way we've come. And I for one am going to ride on something.”

There was a bus-stop very near the Club de Pesca, and a bus was just sliding to the curb. Theodore got on it, but Ramón stood where he was.

“I'll meet you on the Malecón!” Ramón called to him.

Let him exhaust himself on this nonsense, Theodore thought. But as he walked up the bus aisle, he found himself glancing as anxiously as Ramón to make sure that no face on the bus was the pale, furtive face of Infante. Theodore rode past the Malecón until the hotels became thinner, got out and, at the second hotel at which he inquired, secured a room with twin beds for the night. The dull practicality of this jolted him from his thoughts of the preceding hour, and made him feel vaguely ashamed. He resolved not to nag Ramón to sleep in a bed tonight if he preferred to walk the streets or to explore the all-night cabarets. Ramón had a purpose and he had not. That was the difference between them.